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Process PowerShell Output as String in Power Automate

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Posted on 7 Aug 2023 18:41:46 by Ukiman1014

I have a Power Automate Flow which calls a Desktop flow that includes a step to execute a PowerShell script. Since I'm still developing the script, it sometimes errors. I have a Power Automate action that parses the PowershellOutput variable, emailing me if it failed or not and if it failed, the error text. The first problem is that there are no line breaks in the script output in the email. The second problem is I need to do some string manipulation, such as splitting off unneeded text - that's getting an error that it's expecting a string when it's getting an object.

How to do get the output from PowerShell back to Power Automate as a string (not an object) and how do I put in line breaks for insertion into the body of an email? Maybe I need to do all the string manipulation and addition of line breaks in Power Automate Desktop?

(Please ignore that there is no variable in the condition - it dropped out while I was editing before the screenshot was taken.)

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Ukiman1014 on 08 Aug 2023 at 18:28:06

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Re: Process PowerShell Output as String in Power Automate

After getting Replace to work correctly, I ended up passing two variables out of PAD back to Power Automate. One with the original text and another with HTML for the email body.
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Agnius Bartninkas 10,045 Most Valuable Professional on 08 Aug 2023 at 04:50:14

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Re: Process PowerShell Output as String in Power Automate

String manipulation in PAD is quite a bit more powerful mainly because we can use regular expressions. I would actually even send the email via PAD, too, using the Office 365 Outlook actions.

The problem with your Replace text action is that you are trying to use regular expressions, but have not enabled the "Use regular expressions for find and replace" toggle:

Please enable this and it will then work.
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Ukiman1014 on 07 Aug 2023 at 19:15:51

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Re: Process PowerShell Output as String in Power Automate

FYI, I have tried to replace the newline character in the Powershell output with "<br>" using Replace text, but it's unable to find the newline character. (I've also tried just "\n" or "\r".)